Abstract
Apparently—and in spite of manifold similarities in substance and purpose—the Frankfurt School had little direct influence on leading contributors to “La Pensée 68” in France. But, in the Anglophone context, the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse and Fromm were stuffed into the backpacks of the young intellectuals who were shaping the political and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. When the time came for them to embrace French theory and academic postmodernism more generally, they facilitated a merger that contributed to the disruption of established disciplines in the humanities across the board. This chapter focuses on the life and work of Theodor Adorno, but selectively; once again, the aim is to provide enough understanding of what “Critical Theory” originally was so that its eventual influence in the Anglophone context on, say, cultural studies can be justly assessed. This much is clear: of all the forms of “neo-Marxism” that survived the realization that the “superstructure” of culture had a historical efficacy of its own, critical theory as conceived by the Frankfurt School was the most influential and productive.
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22 May 2020
The book was inadvertently published without updating the following corrections. These have been now updated.
Notes
- 1.
“in the prohibition of the images of hope, hope has its last dwelling place … and in the strength to name the forgotten that is concealed in the stuff of experience” (Adorno, in Muller-Doohm 2005: 395).
- 2.
Both men were partial to the same image of their work—a note in a bottle addressed to a possible future on the other side of the Dark Age in which they lived. Compare the last chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
- 3.
The parallels between this analysis and Foucault’s are eerily rich, but Foucault swears he was unacquainted with the Frankfurt School (Macey 1995, 326). More evidence of a late-breaking compressed climax for modernism in France, one that melted almost immediately from structuralist abstraction back into history—but, with Sartre dislodged, a Nietzschean history.
- 4.
Compare Derrida on the idealism at the heart of pure materialism in his interview about Marxism with his former colleagues at Tel Quel (in Positions, (1972) 1981, 39–91).
- 5.
This account obviously comes uncomfortably close to Husserl’s intentionality endowing objects with conceptual identity—as Adorno certainly realized. Hence, the relentless insistence on historical context as the necessary partner in the disclosure of truth content. Hence, the changing truth content of art works over time. Compare Walter Benjamin on translation.
- 6.
Once again, phenomenology’sproximity looms. People who begin to study it in a serious way often describe an experience of relinquishing agency to things and situations. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s famous account of our three dimensional perception as dependent on the “eyes” (perspectives) of objects in the environment (in Kelly 2004).
- 7.
The reader can tell when a work is to be found guilty of commodity fetishism long before the gavel comes down. For the partisan, of course, that frequency simply reflects the ubiquitous influence of the commodity function. But it is troubling how repetitive (algorithmic?) the gesture can seem—especially given Adorno’s heartfelt opposition to any theory that substitutes itself for thought.
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). Critical Theory. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_7
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